Ooh Media’s Mark Fairhurst: ‘Outdoor is not for the faint-hearted’
Ooh Media’s big problem, the one that comes with scale, complexity and a history of acquisitions, is that it has the reputation of being difficult to deal with. It is Mark Fairhurst’s job to change both the reality and the reputation.
That’s a big ask at Australia’s biggest outdoor company, and Fairhurst’s role as Chief Revenue Officer (CRO) has a big remit: he has responsibility for “all things that touch the customer”.
“ The history of Ooh Media is that it’s been built on the acquisition of a number of leading outdoor media companies along the way, each with their own complications and idiosyncrasies,” Fairhurst says. “My priority has been to streamline the structure, the product offering, and the go-to-market to ensure that our offerings are understood, they’re easier to plan and buy, and faster.”
Mark Fairhurst
It has been a busy six months since Fairhurst took up the reins from outgoing sales chief Paul Sigaloff late last year. After a period of stagnating revenue, Ooh committed to a restructure and cost-out program that would eliminate 10% of all roles and save $15 million. The structure of the business was fundamentally changed, collapsing internal silos so that every customer-facing aspect came under the CRO.
Now, Fairhurst says, the teams reporting to him are sales (agency, direct, boutique); marketing; creative hub Poly; product and pricing strategy, go-to-market and partnerships; and campaign delivery and operations.
”We’ve brought all those things in, streamlined them under a very deliberate functional alignment to get to market faster,” he says.
When I comment that he seems to be running the entire company, he points out I have forgotten not only finance, but the crucial commercial and network strategy teams that plan and win outdoor tenders.
“The other thing that’s vital in an environment like this is our P&C [people and culture department, HR]. So look, yes, the touch points for the customer do make up a big percentage of the business.”
Fairhurst has a great deal of experience to draw on from several different areas.
“ I’m often described as an out-of-home veteran. I don’t like the term to start with. But it also doesn’t reflect my full career.”
“ I set up the very first in-house sales team at SBS television. I was a director of Fairfax. And I worked in agency before that and before that I was in change management, so I’ve been around for a while.”
The man Fairhurst replaced, Paul Sigaloff, came from Yahoo, and current (and departing) CEO Cathy O’Connor was a radio boss with no outdoor experience when she joined Ooh more than four years ago. I ask him whether outdoor experience is necessary for success.
“Let me reframe that.”
“ I think out of home at this scale is not for the faint-hearted. But I would say that depending on your entry point, quite often it’s lessons learned in other channels that raise the bar in the out-of-home sector … that’s certainly been part of my journey”
Fairhurst names the Glebe Silos (Sydney) as one of his favourite sites
“But at this kind of scale and at this level it is challenging to not have some sector background and experience. It’s not a standard media company. Out of home is complex in that it’s not a content producer, or largely not a content producer, it doesn’t rely on ratings, it relies on audience and is is in a lot of senses a real estate business.”
Ooh Media’s fortunes have improved since the restructure and Fairhurst’s appointment. At the company’s AGM last week, O’Connor said that revenue in the first quarter of 2025 grew 13% year-on-year and that she expected the second quarter to be just as strong. Out-of-home is expected to continue taking revenue share from other media sectors.
“In the absence of any significant destabilising economic trends in the second half, OOH as a category is expected to grow in high single to double digit percentage points in 2025.”
Fairhurst points to Ooh’s recent tender win with toll road company Transurban – which will see Ooh take over 42 large format roadside billboards in Melbourne and Brisbane – as an example of “an increase in capability and quality”.
“We have incredible contract momentum. So over the last couple of years, we’ve won a number of significant tenders … a number of significant tenders have changed hands across the whole sector. The pieces to the landscape have really shifted over the last couple of years and will continue to shift.”
Fairhurst seems fairly relaxed about the delay to the rollout of the important Move metric (formerly known as Move 2.0), which had been expected to launch in early June. Industry body the Outdoor Media Association has pushed back the expected first use of the tool to 2026.
Promotion for the new Move metric
“This is our industry currency for the next 10 years plus. It’s designed to be a leap forward in the way we measure, plan and buy digital out of home.
“It’s really important that all stakeholders members, customers, agencies and the like, are all comfortable with the data before it is released to market in this case.
“The decision was that all stakeholders just hadn’t had enough time with the data to fully understand it to consider it in the context of their business and the way they operate … for the larger operators with the most formats, it’s simply just a huge amount of data to absorb and understand.”
O’Connor will leave the company half way through the year, and I ask Fairhurst if he is nervous about who his new boss is going to be. He laughs, says he will leave the speculation to “you guys”, and asserts that for a suitably qualified and courageous leader, it’s the best job in media.
“ We’re very lucky that for out-of-home, technology and improvements in data sets have been very complimentary. They have driven our growth. In other sectors they’ve been a real disruptor. So we’ve got those tailwinds, and on top of that, the population keeps growing.”
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